Decolonization was one of the major historical processes that shaped the 20th century and its unfinished projects continue to shape our present. On the occasion of the launch of Verso's Southern Questions, series editor Adom Getachew is joined by Adéwálé Májà-Pearce, Howard French, and Madina Thiam to consider what’s at stake in revisiting the history of decolonization now and what it means to give accounts of politics from the Global South.

About the Panelists:

Adom Getachew is Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (2022). As part of a four-member curatorial team, she curated the exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica and co-edited the accompanying catalogue. She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times.

Adéwálé Májà-Pearce is one of Nigeria’s leading public intellectuals. He is the author of This Fiction Called Nigeria: The Struggle for Democracy, as well as two memoirs, In My Father’s Country and The House My Father Built. His writing regularly appears in the New York Times, London Review of Books, and Times Literary Supplement.

Madina Thiam is a historian of West Africa. She holds a PhD in African history from UCLA, and is currently the James Weldon Johnson Assistant Professor of History at New York University. Thiam also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of West African History, and co-directs PAF, a digital archive of Malian women's anti-colonial struggles and post-colonial gender-based activism. Her current book project, Navel of the World, tells a new history of the Sahel region across two centuries.

Howard French is a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the author of the award winning Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World (Liveright, 2021). He was also formerly a foreign correspondent and senior writer for The New York Times, having worked as a bureau chief in China, Japan, West and Central Africa and Central America and the Caribbean. His next book, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright), will be published in August of this year.

About the Southern Questions series:

Decolonisation was the major historical process of the twentieth century. Its unfinished projects continue to shape our present. The defeat, withdrawal, and reconfiguration of Western colonial power in the postwar decades have affected almost everyone alive today, with stunning unevenness. The Southern Questions series features first-hand accounts – memoirs, novels, pamphlets – written by participants in the drama of decolonisation and its aftermath. Alongside these titles, Southern Questions presents new histories, reportage, and literary criticism devoted to nations, regions, and zones in the South.

Southern Questions Series Launch Event

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